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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: FORM-SICKNESS. There is a mysterious disease which the doctors find difficult of diagnosis, and from which foreign conscripts are said to suffer. They call it... more » nostalgia, or le mal dupays—in plainer English, home-sickness. We have all read how the band-masters of the Swiss regiments in the French service were forbidden to play the Ranz des Vaches, lest the pensive children of the mountains, inspired by the national melody, should run home too quickly to their cows —that is to say, -desert. That dogs wall pine and fret to death for love of the masters they have lost, is an ascertained fact; and I have been told that the intelligent and graceful animal, the South American llama, if you beat, or overload, or even insult him, will, after one glance of tearful reproach from his fine eyes, and one meek wail of expostulation, literally lay himself down and die. Hence, the legend that the bat-men, ere they load a llama, cover his head with a poncho, or a grego, or other drapery, in order that his susceptibilities may not be wounded by a sight of the burden he is to endure : a pretty conceit vilely transposed into English in a story about a cab-horse whose eyes were bandaged by his driver,lest lie should be ashamed of the shabbiness of the fare who paid but sixpence for less than a mile's drive. I was never south of the Isthmus, and never saw a llama, save in connection with an overcoat on a cheap tailor's show-card; but I am given to understand that what I have related is strictly true. If the .lower animals, then, be subject to nostalgia, and if they be as easily killed by moral as by physical ailments, why should humanity be made of sterner stuff ? After all, there may be such things as broken hearts. With regard to home-sickness, however, I hold that, generally, that malady is cau...« less